MAKING MONEY MINING BITCOINS – See How Some People Are Getting RICH from BITCOIN Miners

In my previous post on How to mine Bitcoin on your Mac I recommended MacMiner as my Bitcoin miner of choice. Like Bitcoin itself, the mining hardware and software space moves at the speed of light and shortly after I posted my mining piece I switched to a new OS X mining client called Asteroid.

Although the screenshots below show Bitcoin (BTC) mining, Asteroid is also a capable Litecoin (LTC) miner, which, as I blogged over the weekend, is a better choice if you’re just getting into mining crypto-currencies. The BTC difficulty rate is far too high to make any ROI mining with the GPU in your Mac and BTC mining requires dedicated hardware (ASIC) that’s both expensive and constrained.

xtremeTech has done some sleuthing, and it found last week that certain GPUs (graphics processing units) were no longer available at many retailers, likely having been bought out by Litecoin miners. High-end AMD Radeon GPUs were cited as one of the sold-out models. Newegg and Amazon, among many other retailers, have recently found their high-end GPU shelves empty.

Litecoin mining is definitely a factor, but it is also a temporary spike. To avoid inventory issues, AMD and AMD AIBs don’t have a habit of stocking up, hence they are probably unable to cope with the sudden spike in demand.

AMD orders the silicon from TSMC in Taiwan, PCBs and memory chips come from Taiwan, China and Korea, along with coolers, VRMs and other components, so making sure the supply chain works efficiently is a delicate balancing act.

The Neptune was initially available exclusively to KnCMiner’s previous customers, who ordered million worth of the new rig in 24 hours. Now available to the general public, the company expects the rig’s limited production run of 2,400 units to sell out before Christmas.

Spokesman Ian Chaffee told IBTimes UK: “By KnCMiner’s own estimate, the Neptune can mine up to 2.1 bitcoins per day. This is about a 3.5x improvement on the [old mining rig] Jupiter, which could mine up to 0.6 bitcoins.”

As bitcoin’s value soared from less than to more than ,000 per coin through 2013, demand to purchase faster and more powerful mining equipment soon became a booming industry in itself.

LONDON — Christmas came early for the Winklevii this year. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the twin brothers who famously sued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, own about 1% of the roughly 12 million bitcoins in circulation. Though its value has fluctuated considerably and continues to do so, the digital currency recently hit a high of ,240, up from a year ago — a more than 9000% increase.

Not everyone is sold on bitcoins as an investment. Detractors argue that bitcoins have little or no real-world utility outside transactions on online black markets. Earlier this month, former Dutch central bank president Nout Wellink compared rising bitcoin exchange rates to the Dutch tulip craze of the 17th century, during which the value of certain tulip bulbs rose to several multiples of workers’ annual wages before the price abruptly crashed. Indeed, most current bitcoin owners are believed to be speculators — estimates range from just over 50% to as high as 90% of the total. Sustained speculation may advance an upward price spiral, but bitcoin has already experienced several price readjustments in recent years. And it remains volatile: just three days after topping out over 00 earlier this month, the currency plummeted to 0 after China banned its financial companies from handling bitcoin transactions, though the currency has rebounded somewhat since.